Bizarre Holidays ATCs: February

I think the wacky, unusual holidays are fun to celebrate.  For over a year now I've been participating in monthly bizarrre, wacky holiday trades on ATCsForAll and now I've started playing in the same swap over at SwapBot too.  I don't need an excuse - love making these!  In addition to the one I showed in my last post, I made these for February.

These images are from Vera Lane Studio.  I can't get enough of these - so fun and cute without being over-the-top cute.

I splurged and bought a big box of watercolor crayons recently.  I used them on these ATCs.  I think I'll be playing with them a LOT.  I had to choose this holiday because I'm a wee bit of a coffee addict.  :)

After my dad passed away, we found a box of stamps that he must have collected when he was a wee lad.  I nabbed it to use in my art and that's where these stamps came from (except the butterfly).

I always seem to gravitate to Umbrella Day for the February holidays.  Maybe it's because it's my sister's birthday or maybe it's because I live in Seattle!  This first one is made from a gelli print that I had in my stash.  I also used my watercolor crayons again.

For this umbrella card, I whipped out the raindrop stamp set that I've had forever but hardly ever use.  I think it helped that the last few days have been excessively rainy around here.  I used my Distress markers to color the umbrella.

Pretty pleased with myself that February isn't even here yet and my cards are done.  Woot woot!

12 Tags of 2013: February

Making my January tag got me going.  I had to whip up the February tag too.  :)

I borrowed a few things from His Royal Tagishnous - color scheme, distressed embossing, tissue tape ribbon, and the Queen of Hearts.

I started with a manilla #8 tag.  My first attempt used Spun Sugar and Barn Door stains for the background.  They blended nicely but the Spun Sugar was too light.  I sprayed Bubblegum Pink Dylusions on top of that with an extra misting of water to blend them and that did the trick.  Added some water drops and then randomly stamped with my heart border stamp (just got that the other day on sale for $2 - woop woop!) in red.  Some torn sheet music and Walnut Ink around the edges finished off the background.

I love these playing card mini embossing folders.  I tried it in red and black cardstocks distressing the raised edges but it wasn't looking like I wanted it to.  Instead I decided to use the faux letterpress technique with Barn Door DI.  Love it! (Technically it's backwards - look at the Q - but I like the areas that are recessed and colored).  The black cardstock attempt is a nice backdrop to make the white card stand out more.

 

Her crown is stamped using Tarnished Brass Distress Stain with some red rhinestones, uh...er...jewels, to finish it off.  The fleur de lis necklace was really a copper color but I used the gold alcohol ink to get it to the right color and strung her necklace with bakers twine.

Last was the sentiment using stamps and Dymo tape and the tissue tape crinkled to look like ribbon.

Here's Tim's masterpiece:

I can't tell you how many times I've eyeballed the new mini blueprint stamps - on the top of my Wish List for sure - but I think my mini embossing folder filled in pretty well in the mean time.

Thanks for stopping by.  Happy February!

February Calendar Page

Hey!  The month's not even half over and I finished up my February calendar page.  I'm even tempted to get going on March BEFOREMarch 1st...crazy.

ANYWAY, I was prompted to get this one done by the Stampotique Red, Pink & White challenge this week.  I was going through the template box at preschool the other day and found several broken letter templates.  Bingo!  No good for the kiddies but I was all over bringing them home to use as stencils.

I started with water-misted watercolor paper sprayed with Dylusions Ink - Bubblegum Pink and Postbox Red through large and small alphabet templates.  Apparently some little person had used blue marker the last time on the templates because as I sprayed a bluish-purplish color appeared right around the edges of the letters; I liked it (will have to remember that). 

Dried it a bit and sprayed the whole thing again with pink and red.  I still have some circle templates from when I first started scrapbooking.  They've been gathering dust for ages, but I pulled them out to make the 3 large circles on the right.  Next I brushed some white gesso onto bubble wrap and randomly dabbed that on my page.  I really like how the gesso soaked up the background color.

Following the bubble wrap I took a script stamp with grey ink and randomly stamped about.  Next came a bottle cap with white acrylic paint and I attempted a cork with black ink in the middle of those circles.  A fail was Picket Fence Distress Stain dabbed down the sides as well.  It isn't really visible as my background color is so bright the stain gets lost.  The background is finished off with a small circle stamp and black ink stamped on the sides.  I may have gone a little overboard with circles today - ha ha!

 
To finish the calendar off I stamped the month title with a heart image and red ink onto white cardstock.  Detailed around them with a black pen.  Eric and Linda were stamped onto cream cardstock, colored with Copics and cut out to fit in the top circle.  The calendar grid is simply printer paper swiped with Spun Sugar Distress Stain.  I splatted a dab of Barn Door Distress Stain in the middle of each square stuck it onto the page and, thinking I was OD'ing on red and pink, stuck some black washi tape on the corners.

Wah-lah.  February.  I'm ready now.

Twelve Tags - February

I love Tim Holtz's style - vintage-y and grungy with a little bling and pizzazz.  While I loved following his 12 Tags of Christmas series that is such a busy time of year that I didn't get a chance to play along.  His new format, a tag a month, is a perfect shift.  Here's what Tim did for February:

I tweaked it as best I could with the supplies I have to come up with this:

Tell me you can see the inspiration.  :)  Instead of stamping and embossing with a coordinating folder I heat embossed a really cool vintagey pencil background image.  The inks I used to color the tag are Barn Door, Worn Lipstick, Walnut Stain and Pumice Stone.  My local search for seam binding to stain has been unsuccessful so I tore some cotton fabric and stained that.  Worked pretty well, I think.  Here's a close up of the bottom part:

Thanks for stopping by!